Straight Outta Compton *** (2015, O’Shea Jackson Jr, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Neil Brown Jr, Aldis Hodge) – Movie Review

Director F Gary Gray’s biopic of mid/late-Eighties rap pioneers NWA from the mean streets of Compton in Los Angeles merges the expected anger, guns and violence with much, less predictable, humour and sentimentality, making for a complex, informative and enjoyable movie.

The excellent acting propels it along, especially by stand-out O’Shea Jackson Jr as Ice Cube. (It helps that he’s a perfect lookalike too, perhaps the result of being Cube’s real-life son.) Also notable are Corey Hawkins as frustrated DJ Andre (Dr Dre) and Jason Mitchell as shrewd drug dealer Eric Eazy-E Wright. Neil Brown Jr plays Dj Yella and Aldis Hodge is MC Ren.

The five come together in the studio, hatch Ruthless Records and create 1987’s Boyz-in-the-Hood. In the story, it is the renegade Cube who emerges as the hero, but then the real man is the film’s producer.

Paul Giamatti (in a silly wig) has a stonking big role as the group’s Jewish manager Jerry Heller, who goes from good guy to bad guy, all too suddenly and unconvincingly. Giamatti’s a fine actor, of course, but here he seems to be merely picking up his pay check, slackly reprising his better performed and written role in Love & Mercy.

The screenplay is way over-long at 147 minutes, trying to cram too much detail in. But even so, it needs to spend more time on the police brutality and LA riots that the community is involved in, and less on the intricacies of the group’s personnel and contract and money disputes, which gives it a stale and dull feel in the second half. And unfortunately, it ends in sentimentality rather than have a diamond edge, making it finally drift away and seem less than it really is.

F Gary Gray directed Ice Cube in the movie Friday back in 1995.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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